There is no better website on the planet to learn about real freeware software, and Ian and TechSupportAlert have been true friends to us here on DonationCoder, always supporting our fundraisers and always being generous in their praise of our software.

This is an absolutely essential website for freeware lovers. I hope everyone who has donated to DonationCoder will consider sending them a donation. I know I will.

Gizmo's Freeware is one of the few remaining websites that is doesn't charge for reviews, doesn't offer pay-for-app listing services or accept reviews written by developers and advertisers. That’s the reason our reviews have always been honest and independent and that's the way we want to keep it.

However, we are currently under a lot of financial pressure and its coming from an unexpected source: our users. That’s because 46% of our users now use ad blockers and as a result, our general Google ad revenue has fallen sharply. Don’t get me wrong: we support the right of our users to employ ad-blockers. Hey, we have even recommended to you the best ad-blocking products!

But our fall in ad revenue is now limiting our ability to update our freeware reviews and expand our coverage. That affects everybody. We are looking at long term financial solutions but in the short term we need to survive.

We could easily raise more money by being more blatantly commercial, but we don't want to go there. Instead, we are running a fund-raiser campaign asking our loyal and understanding users to contribute a small amount as a donation to the site.

So please help Gizmo's remain independent and fearless by donating just a few dollars now. In our 16 years of operation I’ve only ever asked twice before for support and hopefully will not need to do so again for a long time. So please guys and gals, stand up and be counted at this time of need.

@mouser: Thanks for the heads-up. It's a good website and worth supporting IMHO.

Point worth noting: Fans of the site techsupportalert.com might not always realise that they need to ensure that their adblocker has the site Whitelisted. (I just checked now, and realised that it wasn't whitelisted in my BadAdJohnny Adblocker. Fixed now.)

It's only become more important over the years, because there is so much "fake" freeware out there now, which calls itself freeware but is really an unusable commercial trial version. TechSupportAlert is the site we can turn to when we want to find what real freeware options are available for a given task, and get recommendations from people who really know their stuff.